Goodfellas

Goodfellas

I couldn’t stand Henry Hill from day one. Who’s this fucking prima donna I asked myself? Henry Hill.  

In 1970 I started a two-year sentence for that drug and firecrackers charge at the Nassau County Correctional Facility. Each floor had four dorms of twenty men each, eighty on a floor. I lived in the dorm next door to Henry Hill, Paul Vario and five or six other made guys. All those guys were in there for conspiracy. Paulie was doing a year. Out of Paulie’s twenty-person dorm about a half-dozen were with him. The rest of the guys he used to make leave when he didn’t want them around and they did it obediently. Fuck, yeah.  

The jail was between minimum and maximum security. You had a set of bars but the bars weren’t in the dorms they were on the entrances to the dorms. You shared a bathroom with twenty people, two or three or four urinals, some toilets, some sinks. Each one had a set of showers. I didn’t like it, I liked to be in a cell by myself. See, you’d get a lot of street thugs in there, they’d steal your candy, they’d steal your cigarettes. They were a lot of fights and stuff in there, more than in the separate cells. I only stayed in the dorms until Paulie and them started to disintegrate and leave, then it was no fun anymore.  

Anyway, when I get to prison those guys are already there. I started out in a regular cell and then they ask me if I would mind going into a dorm. At that time I didn’t know who was in the dorms. I had heard that all these gangsters were somewhere in there, but I didn’t know where. You hear everything in prison, the wire they call it. You know what’s coming down. You know what Joe Blow says he’s in there for but you know what he’s really in there for. We knew who the child molesters were, we knew who everybody was that were disguising themselves. They had a real rough time after they got discovered, I can tell you that. We knew exactly who was coming in and out. What we didn’t know Paulie and the boys would find out because they had all the guards paid off. There were no cell phones in them days but the guards used to let those guys out to use the pay phones. They’d give them change to call their people up every night.  There would be money sent to their houses in envelopes. The jail guards, they were all paid off, most of them. It wasn’t a very good job in them days, probably not to this day, so they made a little extra money for bullshit, you know?  

So anyway, I knew those guys were down there but all of a sudden I’m right next door to them. And I knew a couple of inmates that were friendly with them so they told the gangsters about me and who I worked for and stuff like that. They knew a couple people I worked for, you know, or been involved with, that I was a stand-up guy, a good guy. So, it was all good.  

If you lived in the dorms you were supposed to work. Maybe in the kitchen or in the officer’s mess as a waiter. I worked in the kitchen, so you would steal tea bags or something for Paulie. He would tell you what he wanted. I need this, I need that, I need a couple loaves of bread to make stuffing or something like that. They’d bring in chests of food and they worked on occasion in the kitchen too. They were all cooks and stuff and we ate good. The whole prison ate good when they cooked. The way they use to make dishes and stuff, real good. The food was excellent. I can’t say nothing about the food. It was good. I ate real good. I gained a little weight in there.  

I remember Paulie used to dye his hair. When he first came in there his hair was black. A couple months later it started to turn gray. He said to me, “I can’t wait to get out to paint my hair.” I mean he had kids and everything but he was a player. He wasn’t living with his wife I don’t think and he had young girlfriends and stuff like that.  

After awhile they separated those guys and they made Henry move out of Paulie’s dorm and into my dorm so we were living in the same dorm. I said to Paulie, “Who is this fucking jerk?” meaning Henry. He just looked like a fucking jerk. My friend told me he was a bitch. He’d bitch about everything. Complain. A whiner. Henry Hill was a fucking whiner. So, I said to the guy, right in front of Paulie, I said, “Man, I hate this motherfucker, keep him away from me.”  

Paulie goes, “Oh, he’s a good guy. He’s like a son to me” and all this other stuff.  

I says, “Paulie, I…I…I don’t know, man. I don’t like him. I really don’t. In fact, I kinda hate him. I want to beat the shit out of him or something.”  

“Oh, no, oh, no, please don’t do that”, Paulie says.  I couldn’t stand Henry. I couldn’t stand him. He used to sit there in swag white uniforms from the kitchen, he didn’t want to wear the blue uniforms like everybody else, and then he never even worked in the kitchen. Maybe he worked in the kitchen once or twice. I very rarely saw him work. Work? Fuck work. He was selling drugs in there. Anyway, he used to go and get shoe polish and polish his little shoes, and brush his little teeth. I thought that the guy didn’t have the balls to be in the position that he was in. I had a feeling he wasn’t strong enough to hold up. He was a bitch and that’s what I wanted to do, bitch-smack him, I dreamed of it.

US: http://www.amazon.com/Stand-Up-Guy-ebook/dp/B0068RPDF6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335805806&sr=1-1

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